Disavow links tool, how to use it against harmful or dubious links
There is frequent discussion in the international SEO community about the usefulness of Google’s disavow links tool, the Search Console tool with which a webmaster can reject backlinks if he or she believes they are unnatural or in conflict with Google’s quality standards.
Directions for rejecting backlinks
The topic has also often been addressed by John Mueller, who recently spoke again to clarify his point of view, offering pointers that may come in handy and that also allow us to understand what is the philosophy with which Google approaches disavow and what weight manual intervention by webmasters to reject backlinks may have.
When to use Google’s disavow links tool
Specifically, the Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst describes two typical scenarios in which the use of the disavow links tool can be recommended: when there has been a manual penalty action (manual action, the expression used for accuracy), or when there is a risk of manual action. That is, if incoming links, analyzed by the web spam team, could lead to a penalty.
Avoiding a penalty for suspicious links
Thus, John Mueller seems to suggest that webmasters think preemptively about disavow if they notice backlinks that “would not pass a manual check by the anti-spam team,” even if the site has not (yet?) suffered a penalty.
Google and disavow links, a practice not always recommended
While this does not add much to what we already knew (and wrote about in the past months), Mueller did, however, return to the subject of rejecting backlinks revealing a curious piece of news: using the disavow links tool is not a practice encouraged by Google, which in fact intentionally hides the tool in the Search Console precisely to limit its use.
What is the purpose of rejecting backlinks
To understand the motivations behind this behavior, we need to take a few steps back in time: the disavow links tool was urged by the SEO community after the release of Penguin and the subsequent penalties caused by the immoderate use of tactics that did not comply with the search engine’s guidelines, with the fear that negative SEO techniques could have affected the ranking without any possibility of intervention for the victim site.
Google’s explanations of the use of the disavow links tool
In Google’s view, as Mueller also confirmed on other occasions, it is not important for most sites to focus on suspicious links, because Google’s algorithm also evaluates other factors and can rank a site even if it has spam traits, as we used to tell. In more detail, the Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst explains that the disavow links tool should be used if a site is really concerned about the impact suspicious links may have, even if they were published in years past.
Google algorithm evaluates context and backlink profile
What Mueller seems to suggest is Google is capable of understanding and considering the presence of old “bad” links and more natural links obtained later as normal, interpreting it as a progressive adaptation to the search engine’s guidelines. Translated into other words, the context and evolution of the backlink profile help Google trust a site, and having followed “ill-advised” link building practices in the past is not penalizing in the present, if the strategy then adjusted to Google’s guidelines.
What are the suspect links?
Among the “bad practices” Mueller seems to be hinting at for acquiring suspect links is mainly the publication of paid articles in which a link appears that has an over-optimized anchor text of dry keywords, which is in contrast to the more natural links contained in articles with citations and references to other sites.
SEO tips on rejecting backlinks
In any case, it is important for those working on a site’s SEO to be familiar with Google’s disavow links tool and know when to possibly use it, especially if the site has lost rankings and it is suspected that the cause may be related to inbound links. Similarly, if rejecting backlinks does not give the hoped-for result and the site does not have the hoped-for benefits, it means that for Google those links were harmless and the problem of declining rankings has a different origin to be investigated with more targeted analysis.
